And so I fell devoutly asleep and slept a long time, because young people seem to need sleep more than the old, who have already slept so much and are preparing to sleep for all eternity.

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot.

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.

There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

To survive, you must tell stories.

But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

You endure what is supposedly unbearable, and before you know it, you would have done the impossible by bearing the unbearable.

There is no greater will on earth than the will to survive. These fine people, answering my father's call to arms, had the will in spades and droves. - Lord Tristan Dracanburh, Ethandun

I've been married fifty-five years and I've been home three weeks.

When you use any kind of internet based capability, any kind of electronic capability, to cause damage to a private entity or a foreign nation or a foreign actor, these are potential acts of war.

Your wallet will be stolen, you'll get fat, slip on the bathroom tiles of a foreign hotel and crack your hip.

My informal writing style is a political choice, because I want feminism to be more accessible.

For the painter, the system of painting in flat tints is superior to all others.

Tradition remains alive only when we struggle with it.

I've come to the conclusion that the average person can do about four things a day, like four real things a day.

If people could learn history, what lessons it might teach us!